Computer systems, in particular distributed computer networks that execute application programs may detect exceptional situations. These exceptional situations may be unexpected, and may have impact on other parties participating in the network. Therefore, the applications of the computer systems or of the distributed computer network generate alerts to inform one or more users about the exceptional situation. Such kinds of alerts may be the termination of a contract, a delivery problem for an order, a potential out-of-stock situation, or technical problems in a system.
Alerts are objects that consist of general attributes regarding partners, users and time of creation or change, a message text with configurable place holders and data structure for application data that can be configured. The alert type of the alert describes this configuration. The scope of the alerts themselves can be restricted, either to specific partners, or more specifically according to the application data.